ALMEDA is a five-year research project with three interlocking ambitions:
By researching the history of literary metadata about African expressive cultures in libraries and archives, we aim to understand the ways in which colonial cataloguing constructed the idea of the ‘literary work’. How did colonial catalogues classify oral and performed expressive cultures and how has this impacted our continued understanding of the literary field up to this day?
We aim to develop a multilingual metadata ontology specifically designed for the large body of oral, unpublished, and informal literary materials that have been, and continue to be, a major part of literary production on the continent. By rethinking the organisation of the literary field around published books, we aim to improve the visibility and authority of non-book literatures in the field of African literary studies.
Our major outcome will be a linked open repository of metadata on oral, unpublished and informal African literatures. By creating and linking metadata on this body of work, this repository will make these literatures searchable and visible despite their structural ephemerality. The repository, which is run as a Wikibase Instance, is currently in process and will be opened as soon as possible. Please contact us if you have any questions.
A new dataset is the outcome of a collaboration with the Centre for Creative Arts, UKZN. This dataset includes biographical information on all the poets who performed at the Poetry Africa festival from 1997 to 2022. The dataset builds on data compiled by University of Kwa-Zulu Natal’s Centre for Creative Arts,…
This article provides a case study of the history of the cataloging system at Makerere University Library and discusses how this has come to shape the body of African literature housed there. The article is available as an open access publication. Harris, Ashleigh. “African Literary Metadata and Makerere University’s Library.” Research…
We’re delighted to share the completion of a project carried out by poet and Swahili lecturer (at the Centre for African Studies, Copenhagen University) Lisa Mumbi Macharia. This dataset documents over 10 years of spoken word poetry performances in the city of Nairobi. Mumbi recorded 628 performances from between March…
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